The Pauli exclusion principle states that no two electrons in the same atom can have the same set of quantum numbers. The principle was first stated by the great Austrian-Swiss physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) in 1925.
The 1920s were a decade of enormous upheaval in atomic physics. Niels Bohr's model of the atom, proposed in 1913, had been a historic breakthrough in scientists' attempts to understand the nature of matter. But even from the outset, it was obvious that the Bohr model was inadequate to explain the fine points of atomic structure. In some ways, the most important contribution made by B…
In the early 1920s, Pauli reached an important insight about the nature of an electron's quantum numbers. Suppose, Pauli said, that an atom contains eight electrons. Then it should be impossible, he predicted, for any two of those electrons to have exactly the same set of quantum numbers. As an example, consider an electron in the first orbit. All first-orbit electrons have a primary quantu…
For more than half a century, chemists had known that the chemical elements display a regular pattern of properties, a discovery originally announced as the periodic law by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907) in about 1869. The Pauli exclusion principle provided important theoretical support for the periodic law. When a chart is made showing the electronic configuration of all the ele…
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments